IXI Limited was a Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

, UK

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

-based software company founded in 1988. The company was the leading supplier of window

Window (computing)

In computing, a window is a visual area containing some kind of user interface. It usually has a rectangular shape that can overlap with the area of other windows...

ing software for Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

, supporting all the popular UNIX platforms of the time.

IXI's best-known product was X.desktop

X.desktop

X.desktop was an early desktop environment graphical user interface built on the X Window System. It was developed and sold during the late 1980s and early 1990s by IXI Limited, a British software house based in Cambridge...

, an X11

X Window System

The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

-based graphical desktop for UNIX systems. It also sold IXI Panorama (a window manager

Window manager

A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment...

), IXI Premier Motif

Motif (widget toolkit)

In computing, Motif refers to both a graphical user interface specification and the widget toolkit for building applications that follow that specification under the X Window System on Unix and other POSIX-compliant systems. It emerged in the 1980s as Unix workstations were on the rise, as a...

, IXI Wintif (a version of Motif with Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 3.11, and later Windows 95, look-and-feel) and Motif training courses. The IXI Mosaic product included with later versions of X.desktop and IXI Panorama was “the world's first commercial web browser”, according to IXI founder Ray Anderson.

IXI was acquired by the Santa Cruz Operation in February 1993. The IXI brand continued until 1995 when the company (now a business unit of SCO) was merged with another SCO acquisition, Visionware, to form IXI Visionware. Later that year the merged business unit was integrated more fully into its parent and became the Client Integration Division of SCO. This division developed and released the Tarantella terminal services application in 1997 and became the core of Tarantella, Inc.

Tarantella, Inc.

Santa Cruz Operation was a software company based in Santa Cruz, California which was best known for selling three Unix variants for Intel x86 processors: Xenix, SCO UNIX , and UnixWare. Eric Raymond, in his book The Art of Unix Programming, calls SCO the "first Unix company"...

in 2001.

Following company-wide layoffs, the Cambridge development site closed in 2003.